SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

This thread is a continuation of the spacefm comments at the end of the PCManFM-Mod thread. For users of other distros to see more of your ideas, please consider posting to my blog or the SpaceFM Forum as well. Thanks for all the constructive feedback!

SpaceFM is looking interesting. I hope it would not be a burden to make feature suggestions for such a new project but:

1. Have files/folders be sorted alphabetically in addition to by filetype.

2. Shorter names for devices in sidebar. Or at least the ability to rename them.

3. Have separate icons for each individual bookmark.

4. Ability to customize (choose) the buttons on the toolbar.

5. Separate the sidebar and its button from the panels. Currently each panel can have its own sidebar. Maybe this is intentional but it seems redundant.

1. Probably a good idea - I've added it to the list.

2. The devices list is sloppy by design - this allows maximum info for each line (columns waste space). Personally I like to see as much as I can about a device at a glance. I probably won't make each one renameable, but I could add an option to make the names simpler. Any suggestions on format? What would you like to see in the list? I probably won't make that a columned list though - just labels.

3. Unlikely, but I'll consider it.

4. This already exists, but the interface is a little non-intuitive. If you click the leftmost toolbar icon (a little wrench), you'll see Left and Right menus. (These are going to be renamed Left Toolbar and Right Toolbar for better clarity.) Use View|Design Mode to modify those menus, choosing icons, and checking or unchecking 'Show'. The toolbars mirror those menus - that is their purpose. You can also add custom commands to the toolbar by adding to these menus. I don't particularly like this approach, but my plan A failed because I couldn't get gtk to give me any useful events on toolbuttons for Design Mode. So that is the best I could come up with for now.

5. If you mean the side panes (devices, bookmarks, etc), it is part of the design that each browser panel has its own, but each is shown optionally.

SpaceFM looks really nice. I like how one can customize almost everything of it smile. Especially the bash integration is a really nice idea.

I also want to suggest a feature which I think would be usefull:

Mounting of LUKS-encrypted devicesSince most of my external drives are encrypted I would really help if one could decrypt them from the FM (like in Thunar and the newer versions of pcmanfm).

In their case, that support probably comes in from gvfs, which spacefm doesn't use. But I'll consider some form of this. Also note you can add any command you want to the devices menu (use View|Design Mode), so you can add your own decrypt command. Or if it needs root, you may want to install your command as a plugin (plugins are write-protected by root). Thanks for the ideas.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

For the window title suggestion @ earlier thread, I would like to add, that if just adding option for "full path window title" sounds wrong, maybe you could customize it similarly as launchers and custom actions. Allow user to type syntax which will set title accordingly where eg. %D would be full path, %d folder name so on..

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

@IgnorantGuru

Wow - I think SpaceFM is one of the most exciting new projects I've heard about in a long time! You've already put in a tremendous amount of work and its functionality and ability to be customized are really impressive already; it covers many of the things I've absolutely coveted in file managers. My experiments so far have been very successful and the only problems have been a few segfaults, usually to do with root windows, etc.

If SpaceFM proves rock-solid in reliability over time, and it can be reasonably kept maintained, I think it could become a really important tool on Linux. It will be brilliant for light systems and the multi-pane layout improves productivity no end IMHO. You'll leave the opposition standing!

Quick queries so far:1) Can you re-order the listing of the Tools?2) In the filelist pane, the Open context menu has the entries Extract and Extract To. The default icons for these seem to be tap-extract and tap-extract-to respectively. Are these non-standard, because I have both Faenza and Gnome icons installed and they're not included, and not found elsewhere on my Arch + Openbox system.3) Is there some way to flag or colour the active pane or tab? (I see this is indicated by directory name in the window title, but it's not as striking or foolproof as a colour indication)

Please keep up the (very) good work as long as you have the energy!:-)

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

Beautiful file manager, reminds me of Thunar before horrible things happened to it. Might there be a way to change the Bookmarks icon? It always stays that bland, gray colored folder regardless of icon theme.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

Just installed and trying this multi-paned fm and looks nice. One improvement requires imo is re-sizing of the name column.The width can not be reduced after a limit. I will report back for other requests/bugs.Thanks ignorantguru

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

ninian wrote:

@IgnorantGuru

Wow - I think SpaceFM is one of the most exciting new projects I've heard about in a long time! You've already put in a tremendous amount of work and its functionality and ability to be customized are really impressive already; it covers many of the things I've absolutely coveted in file managers. My experiments so far have been very successful and the only problems have been a few segfaults, usually to do with root windows, etc.

If SpaceFM proves rock-solid in reliability over time, and it can be reasonably kept maintained, I think it could become a really important tool on Linux. It will be brilliant for light systems and the multi-pane layout improves productivity no end IMHO. You'll leave the opposition standing!

Quick queries so far:1) Can you re-order the listing of the Tools?2) In the filelist pane, the Open context menu has the entries Extract and Extract To. The default icons for these seem to be tap-extract and tap-extract-to respectively. Are these non-standard, because I have both Faenza and Gnome icons installed and they're not included, and not found elsewhere on my Arch + Openbox system.3) Is there some way to flag or colour the active pane or tab? (I see this is indicated by directory name in the window title, but it's not as striking or foolproof as a colour indication)

Please keep up the (very) good work as long as you have the energy!:-)

Hi ninian - thanks for the positive feedback! If those segfaults are reproducable, please file a ticket on them, and if it involves root, be sure to include what graphical su command you're using (in preferences|advanced). The only problem I'm aware of is trying to open a new root window with ktsuss fails for me (but doesn't segfault) - haven't been able to figure out ktsuss's problem with this, but every graphical su has its own quirks. If the segfaults aren't predictable, then any info you can give me would be helpful - I'm not seeing any of them. That kind of report goes to the top of my list so I'll do my best to address them.

> 1) Can you re-order the listing of the Tools?

Yes, use View|Design Mode to cut a tool, then use it again on another command to paste it where you want. You can paste it into any menu, not just Tools.

> 2) In the filelist pane, the Open context menu has the entries Extract and Extract To

To be honest I'm not sure where those icons came from, but the defaults are probably going to be changed anyway - I'd like to stick with stock gtk icons for the default to keep dependencies low, despite the lack of them. You can change those icons to anything you want of course.

> 3) Is there some way to flag or colour the active pane or tab?

I'd like there to be - I'll see what I can find. There is a dotted line focus border. A gtk theme that makes active widgets noticeable is helpful too. Also, by design spacefm tries to minimize the need to know which panel is active using context. Except for inter-panel key shortcuts - then you need to know.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

milso wrote:

Beautiful file manager, reminds me of Thunar before horrible things happened to it. Might there be a way to change the Bookmarks icon? It always stays that bland, gray colored folder regardless of icon theme.

Thanks. You can change the bookmarks icon by right-clicking in the Bookmarks pane and selecting Icon. If that pane isn't visible, select Bookmarks|Open.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

kgas wrote:

Just installed and trying this multi-paned fm and looks nice. One improvement requires imo is re-sizing of the name column.The width can not be reduced after a limit. I will report back for other requests/bugs.Thanks ignorantguru

This is hard to get working the way I want as gtk has a mind of its own. The name column is special in that it automatically expands to fill available space. So if you're trying to make it smaller, first you need to increase the size of one of the other columns, then resize the window's width. The name column should then shrink itself. The good news is that once you get the columns how you want, they should stay that way.

I'll take another look at this eventually and see if I can get it to work better - thanks for the reminder.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

IgnorantGuru wrote:

milso wrote:

Beautiful file manager, reminds me of Thunar before horrible things happened to it. Might there be a way to change the Bookmarks icon? It always stays that bland, gray colored folder regardless of icon theme.

Thanks. You can change the bookmarks icon by right-clicking in the Bookmarks pane and selecting Icon. If that pane isn't visible, select Bookmarks|Open.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

IgnorantGuru wrote:

Hi ninian - thanks for the positive feedback! If those segfaults are reproducable, please file a ticket on them, and if it involves root, be sure to include what graphical su command you're using (in preferences|advanced). The only problem I'm aware of is trying to open a new root window with ktsuss fails for me (but doesn't segfault) - haven't been able to figure out ktsuss's problem with this, but every graphical su has its own quirks. If the segfaults aren't predictable, then any info you can give me would be helpful - I'm not seeing any of them. That kind of report goes to the top of my list so I'll do my best to address them.

Have filed a ticket on segfaults which occur with File / Root Window, using both ktsuss and gksudo.

Added later: But if I create a Tool, with the command 'gksudo spacefm' it works fine!

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

IgnorantGuru wrote:

> 3) Is there some way to flag or colour the active pane or tab?

I'd like there to be - I'll see what I can find. There is a dotted line focus border. A gtk theme that makes active widgets noticeable is helpful too. Also, by design spacefm tries to minimize the need to know which panel is active using context. Except for inter-panel key shortcuts - then you need to know.

Hmmm... I'm using the Adwaita themes and I can't see the "dotted line focus border" anywhere - maybe it's an option in the theme?Having used SpaceFM quite a bit today, I think this is quite a big usability issue, especially when you're using single-click activation, which I prefer for speed. But if you don't know easily which pane is active ... one click and you can be dead (or at least waiting a while for LibreOffice to load)!

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

ninian wrote:

Have filed a ticket on segfaults which occur with File / Root Window, using both ktsuss and gksudo.

Thanks - this has been corrected (always helps to not free memory immediately after allocating it.) And you solved the mystery of why ktsuss was acting strangely for me even though I never saw the segfault.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

ninian wrote:

Hmmm... I'm using the Adwaita themes and I can't see the "dotted line focus border" anywhere - maybe it's an option in the theme?Having used SpaceFM quite a bit today, I think this is quite a big usability issue, especially when you're using single-click activation, which I prefer for speed. But if you don't know easily which pane is active ... one click and you can be dead (or at least waiting a while for LibreOffice to load)!

Not sure I understand. Any kind of click in any panel should focus that panel, so why is it important to know which panel is active? Can you give a set of steps so I can see what you mean?

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

GURU THANK YOU!This is wonderful piece of software!

I've been using spacefm since you posted about it in pcmanfm mod topic and it has replacedevery other gui fm I had installed. I didn't encounter any problems, crashes or whatever.Ktsuss works just fine, no segfaults. It's superfast on startup even without daemonizing and opening(autosaved) session makes me smile .

I also have few feature requests:

1. Custom commands that depend on filetype, just like Thunar's implementation.eg. I don't want to find subtitles (submarine) for .torrent.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

Šaran wrote:

GURU THANK YOU!This is wonderful piece of software!

I've been using spacefm since you posted about it in pcmanfm mod topic and it has replacedevery other gui fm I had installed. I didn't encounter any problems, crashes or whatever.Ktsuss works just fine, no segfaults. It's superfast on startup even without daemonizing and opening(autosaved) session makes me smile .

I also have few feature requests:

1. Custom commands that depend on filetype, just like Thunar's implementation.eg. I don't want to find subtitles (submarine) for .torrent.

Re: SpaceFM - A Customizable File Manager

Not sure I understand. Any kind of click in any panel should focus that panel, so why is it important to know which panel is active? Can you give a set of steps so I can see what you mean?

If you're using the detailed list display (say, of a big directory) and single-click activation, then you might not have any obvious space in a panel to click on to regain focus! [Just found out that, in this case, clicking on the location box is the safest way of gaining focus.] There's the danger of clicking to focus, but inadvertently launching a program. That's why all the other 2+ pane managers - Worker, EmelFM2, XFE, etc - have some indicator of which panel is actually active. But I see there's another way of telling the active panel - "hover select" only works on the active one, obviously.

Hope this clarifies a bit; it's no show-stopper, and arguments can reasonably be made either way.